The United States: Sexual Freedom, Choice, and the Loneliness Paradox

Two dates, thirty-nine years apart, say most of what a Japanese reader needs in order to place the United States. The combined oral contraceptive pill was approved there in 1960. It was approved in Japan in 1999.

Two more dates, sixty-two years apart, say the rest. A constitutional right to abortion was established in 1973 and removed in 2022.

Put those four together and the usual framing collapses. The United States is not a society that has been steadily liberalising and can be read as a preview of where everywhere else is going. It is a society where one kind of freedom advanced very early and very far, another kind advanced and then reversed, and a third never arrived at all. What that produces is not a straightforward story of progress. It is a specific settlement, and the settlement has a cost that shows up in places nobody expected to look.

The American story is unusual in that most of it happened in courtrooms rather than parliaments, which matters enormously for how durable any of it turned out to be.

Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a ban on contraception for married couples in 1965. Eisenstadt v. Baird extended that to unmarried people in 1972, on the reasoning that if privacy means anything it belongs to the individual rather than to the marriage. Roe followed in 1973. Title IX, passed in 1972, reshaped education and sport for women more thoroughly than almost any other single statute. Obergefell recognised same-sex marriage nationally in 2015.

Two of those were legislation. The rest were court decisions, and a court decision rests on an interpretation that a later court can reinterpret. That is what happened in 2022, and it is the single most useful thing an observer outside the United States can understand about the place: a right that arrives by judicial reasoning can leave the same way, and the constituency that won it may never have had to build the legislative majority that would have made it hard to reverse.

The other detail worth carrying is how recent some of it is. Marital rape was not a crime in all fifty states until 1993. That is not a nineteenth-century fact. It is within the working lifetime of women who are now grandmothers.

Here is the part that gets lost when the United States is discussed as a culture rather than as a country with a policy record.

It has no federal paid parental leave. Among wealthy countries this is close to unique. What exists federally is unpaid job-protected leave for some workers under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, with eligibility conditions that exclude a substantial share of the workforce. Some states have built their own paid programmes; most have not. Childcare is largely a private cost, and in many metropolitan areas that cost is comparable to rent.

So the settlement, stated plainly: a woman in the United States obtained early and expansive control over whether to become pregnant, obtained it partly through courts, has watched part of it withdrawn, and never at any point obtained the material infrastructure that would make the resulting choices cheap.

That is why the freedom is best described as expressive rather than material. A person may speak about sex with a frankness that has genuinely no parallel in Japan, may organise her life outside marriage without social collapse, may leave a bad relationship without destitution being automatic. And she may also be calculating whether a pregnancy would end her career, in a country that provides no leave, in a state that may no longer allow her to decide.

Now the part that is genuinely strange, and that this essay is named for.

In 2023 the United States Surgeon General issued a public advisory on loneliness and social isolation, treating it as a public health matter of the same class as smoking or obesity. Whatever one thinks of the framing, a national health authority does not issue an advisory about a feeling unless the underlying numbers have been alarming people for some time.

Alongside that, a body of survey research has reported declining sexual frequency among American adults, particularly among younger adults, across several decades of the General Social Survey and similar instruments. The phenomenon is sometimes called the sex recession, and the label is doing more work than the evidence strictly supports, which is a point this essay returns to.

Set those beside the cultural export and the picture is odd. The society that produces the most sexually confident media on earth, that invented most of the vocabulary the rest of us use for dating, and that removed more formal restrictions on adult sexual life earlier than almost anywhere, is also the one running a national conversation about how few people are having sex and how many of them are lonely.

The temptation is to conclude that freedom caused it. That conclusion is available, satisfying, and probably wrong, which is what the counter-thesis section is for.

One fact does more than any other to break the idea of a single American sexual culture.

The federal government has for decades funded abstinence-centred sex education through dedicated programme streams, alongside, at various points, more comprehensive approaches. Education policy in the United States is overwhelmingly set at state and district level, so what a fifteen-year-old is taught varies enormously between two towns an hour apart. The evaluation literature on abstinence-focused programmes has generally not found that they delay first intercourse, and that finding has been available for a long time without ending the funding.

So the same teenager who can watch anything on a phone may sit in a classroom where contraception is discussed only in terms of failure rates. There is no contradiction from inside: these are different institutions serving different constituencies in a federal system, and neither is obliged to notice the other.

A reader in Japan should hold on to that, because it is the structural feature that most often gets flattened. The United States is not one sexual culture with a liberal tendency. It is several, layered on the same territory, each with its own laws.

The mechanism of introduction changed faster in the United States than almost anything else, and the research on it is unusually good.

Work by Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues tracking how couples meet found that meeting online overtook every other route for heterosexual couples, and that it did so within about two decades, displacing friends, family, neighbourhood, church and workplace as the dominant introduction channel. For same-sex couples the transition happened earlier and more completely.

That is a bigger change than it sounds. The older channels all carried social vetting with them: the friend who introduced you had reputational skin in the game, the neighbourhood had memory. An app replaces that with volume, and volume is a different kind of resource. It solves the problem of not meeting anyone and creates the problem of choosing between strangers with no accountability behind them.

It also reorganises effort. A great deal of what used to be courtship is now filtering, and filtering is unpaid, repetitive and disproportionately done by women, who in most studies receive far more initial contact and spend correspondingly more time discarding it. Whatever else the apps did, they moved a large quantity of unglamorous labour onto one side of the exchange.

The reading this essay has been building toward is that American sexual freedom produced American loneliness. That reading is popular in Japan, popular among American conservatives, and should be treated with suspicion by anyone who notices how convenient it is for both.

Take the sex recession first. The trend is real in the survey data, and the explanations that fit it best are not primarily about liberation. More young adults live with parents for longer, for economic reasons. More are partnered later. Alcohol consumption among the young has fallen, and a considerable amount of casual sexual contact historically ran through drinking. Screen time displaces hours that were previously unstructured. Each of those is an economic or technological story rather than a moral one, and together they account for a good deal of the decline without requiring freedom to be the culprit.

Take loneliness next. It has risen in many wealthy countries, including several with sexual cultures nothing like the American one, and including Japan, which established a minister for loneliness in 2021. A phenomenon that appears across societies with opposite sexual settlements is unlikely to have been caused by one of those settlements.

And take the direction of the arrow seriously. It is at least as plausible that the economic conditions producing later independence, longer working hours and thinner local institutions are producing both the isolation and the reduced sexual contact, with sexual freedom sitting beside them rather than above them.

What survives the counter-thesis is narrower and more interesting than the headline. Not that freedom caused loneliness. That the United States demonstrates, unusually clearly, that removing restrictions is not the same as building the conditions in which people can actually reach each other. Those are two different projects, and a society can complete the first and never start the second.

Abstract as all of that is, it lands on particular women in a shape they would recognise.

A woman in her mid-thirties in a large American city has more sexual latitude than her grandmother could have imagined and less certainty about her own reproductive future than her mother had, because the legal position in her state may have changed twice since she finished university. She has a vocabulary for consent that is far more precise than anything available in Japanese, and she is using it in a dating market where volume has replaced vetting.

She is likely to have had therapy, or to speak in its vocabulary, and to be surrounded by a culture that treats being healed as a qualification for intimacy rather than a possible consequence of it. If she wants children, she is doing arithmetic involving no paid leave and childcare costs that may exceed her rent. If she does not, she will be asked about it, in language more polite than the Japanese version but with the same structure underneath.

That is the specific texture of the settlement. Enormous articulacy about desire, real legal precarity about reproduction, and an atomised infrastructure that leaves every arrangement to be privately financed.

Here is the comparison that makes the whole essay worth writing, and it is not the one usually drawn.

The United States gave women early and expansive control over reproduction and never built the material support that makes using that control cheap. Japan did close to the reverse. It delayed the pill until 1999 and still makes abortion conditional in ways that surprise foreign observers, while providing universal health coverage, statutory paid parental leave that is generous by international standard, and childcare costs far below the American ones.

Two wealthy democracies. Each handed women one half of the same thing and withheld the other. A Japanese woman has the infrastructure and a thinner claim over the decision; an American woman has had the decision, contested and partly withdrawn, and no infrastructure at all.

That is what the ladder picture makes invisible. On any single index one of these countries outranks the other, and the ranking tells you nothing, because the two are not at different points on one road. They made different trades, and a woman in either can look across and see something she does not have.

And the second-order observation matters more than the first. Japan has the more generous leave system on paper and a well-documented gap between the leave that exists and the leave that fathers take. The United States has almost no system and a culture of negotiating individually for what one can get. Neither arrangement delivers what its own description promises, which is the most reliable finding in this entire chamber.

Two things travel badly from the United States to Japan, and both are commonly imported anyway.

The first is the directness. American scripts for stating a preference, ending a relationship, or naming a boundary work inside a culture where being disagreed with does not damage the relationship the following morning, and where a person who advocates for herself is read as competent rather than difficult. Lifting the script without that substrate does not produce an assertive woman. It produces a woman who has been advised to behave in a way that is genuinely more costly for her than for the person who advised her, and who is then told her hesitation is internalised oppression rather than an accurate reading of her own room.

The second is the idea that sexual freedom is an attitude. In the American account it often sounds like one, because the legal history has receded into the background. It was not an attitude. It was courts, statutes, funding streams and forty years of organised argument, and it is being reversed in the same way. Importing the confidence without noticing the machinery produces a reader who believes the difference is that Japanese women have not decided to be free, which is both false and cruel.

What does travel is the diagnosis rather than the remedy: that removing a restriction and building the conditions for a life are separate projects, and that a society can be loud about the first while doing nothing about the second.

The dates and legal facts here — 1960, 1965, 1972, 1973, 1993, 2015, 2022 — are public record and are stated from memory; they should be verified against primary sources before this piece is marked fact-checked. Abortion access in the United States now varies by state to a degree that no national sentence captures, and this essay deliberately avoids one.

The sex recession is a real pattern in survey data and a contested interpretation. Sample framing, question wording and cohort effects all bear on it, and the size of the decline is argued about. It is used here to describe a direction, never a magnitude, and the essay explicitly declines to treat it as caused by liberalisation.

The loneliness material rests on a national advisory, which is a synthesis and an act of public-health framing rather than a new finding. Cross-country comparison of loneliness is notoriously sensitive to how the question is asked, which is one reason this essay uses it to undercut a causal story rather than to build one.

The couple-formation research is unusually solid but is about the United States, and the displacement of older introduction channels has happened at different speeds elsewhere. The claim about filtering labour falling disproportionately on women is well supported in app-behaviour studies and less well quantified than the general trend.

And this is one essay about a country of enormous internal variation. Everything above is truer of urban and coastal life than of rural life, and a reader who knows the place will find at least one paragraph that does not describe anyone she knows.

The useful thing to take from the United States is not its confidence and not its warnings. It is the separation it makes visible.

Removing what stops people is one project. Building what lets them reach each other is another. The United States did an enormous amount of the first, starting earlier than almost anyone, and has spent very little on the second, and the result is a society where a woman can say anything about what she wants and may still be doing the arithmetic alone.

Japan has made a different trade, and the trade is not obviously worse. The thing worth envying in the American settlement is not the liberty in the abstract. It is the vocabulary: the ordinary availability of words for consent, preference and refusal that a person can use without a scene. That part is portable, and it costs nothing legislative to begin using.

If what this leaves you with is less about America and more about which words you actually have available for what you want, that is the intended result. Moonlight’s Guided Discovery is one private place to find out which of them you have never needed to say out loud, at your own pace and with nothing to conclude.